Writing matlab vector to a file that is matlab readable - matlab

For matlab: Is there a way to write the value of a vector to a file that can later be opened and read by another matlab program?
Specifically: I have a matlab program that computes a binary-valued vector $zvector$ with 10^7 entries. I want to write $zvector$ as data to an output file so that it can be emailed and easily read as input to another matlab program. Ideally, the output file would be called “Output.m” and would look like:
zvector=[
0
1
1
…
0
1
];
I like the .m format because it is easy to use for matlab input. I have experimented with matlab’s write() and fwrite() commands, with no success. I observe that these generate files that cannot be easily read as matlab-recognizable inputs (at least, I do not know how to read from them). Is there a way to accomplish my goals? Thanks.
PS: I am interested in the easiest way. If this involves a different type of file format (not a .m format) that is fine. However, in that case, can you provide both the writing and reading commands? Thanks again.

Thanks to #edwinksl for pointing me in the right direction with MAT files. I do not know the accepted practice here, but in stackexchange math it is encouraged to answer your own question if a hint from comments got you all the way there. So I will answer my own question.
The Mat format does this well. Here are example script files for reading and writing in the Mat format (see also links in above comments for more documentation):
***Script file OutputTest.m:
filename = 'TestFile.mat';
TestVector=[1 1 0 1];
save(filename, 'TestVector');
***Script file IntputTest.m
filename = 'TestFile.mat';
file=load(filename);
z =file.TestVector;
z

Related

How to view the source code of a .mex file

I saw online that you can just use edit rgb2gray to open up the source file, but I ran into another function in the rgb2gray.m file that I don't know how to view.
Lines 54-55 contain the following function:
if threeD
I = images.internal.rgb2graymex(X);
How do I view the source code for this rgb2graymex function?
rgb2graymex is, as its name suggests, a .mex file. .mex files are pre-compiled files which you thus cannot view the contents of, unless you use exotic decompilers (which usually don't give a 100% result), or obtain the source code from the one who's written it, which is not going to happen with proprietary code.
Read more on MEX files on the MathWorks site.
In general you can't see the contents of a .mex file, as #Adriaan indicates in his answer.
You mention in the comments, though, that what you really want is to find the coefficients used from the transform matrix for converting RGB to grayscale. You can find these in the code immediately below the section you quote:
T = inv([1.0 0.956 0.621; 1.0 -0.272 -0.647; 1.0 -1.106 1.703]);
coef = T(1,:);
That gives me:
coef =
0.298936021293775 0.587043074451121 0.114020904255103
Now it's true that you can't demonstrate conclusively that the .mex file is doing the same thing as this; but the .mex file is just there to speed things up when you pass in a big mxnx3 RGB image, rather than a small nx3 RGB colormap. I'd be very surprised if it was using different coefficients. A few experiments that I've just done indicate only the tiniest of numerical differences (<1e-15) between the .mex file and using the coefficients present in the code.

matlab cannot read text file containing ^* as power of 10

I need to read text files into Matlab. In the text files there are numbers like 5.875489^*-6, which is indeed 0.000005875489. Matlab cannot read this format and since there are too many files, I cannot change the format in all the files manually. So, I wonder if there is any tips to make Matlab reading the files as they are?
Any help and guide is highly appreciated.
Marilla.
As pointed out by #vu1p3n0x, it would probably be easier to replace ^* by e using a replace-all. Alternatively, if that is unpractical, you could read in the the mantissa and exponent separately and perform the exponentiation in Matlab:
Raw = textscan(fid, '%f^*%f');
Result = Raw{1}.*10.^Raw{2};

How do I convert Mathematica code into Matlab?

I'm just starting to learn MatLab.
This is what I'd like to convert into MatLab code:
http://postimg.org/image/jqdvcrbod/
Since a lot of my variables are functions or other variables, does that mean that when I write them as functions in MatLab I have to save each of the functions as a separate file? Is there any other way? I don't want to end up with a million separate files, but as of right now, if I write more then one function in the editor, it starts getting confused and doesn't recognize the second function.
Also, is there a way to use actual symbols (like the square root symbol instead of writing "sqrt()") like in Mathematica? I feel like long equations (like the last one) are easier on the eye that way, but that's purely aesthetics.
Is there a way to have MatLab output unassigned variables? Like in Mathematica, if I have y(x) = 2x, if i don't put anything for x, it just outputs 2x.
One quick way to do is use a package in Mathematica called ToMatlab (I attached the download link). It is able to convert Mathematica symbol syntax to Matlab .m file.
Hope this would help.

Simplest way to read space delimited text file matlab

Ok, so I'm struggling with the most mundane of things I have a space delimited text file with a header in the first row and a row per observation and I'd like to open that file in matlab. If I do this in R I have no problem at all, it'll create the most basic matrix and voila!
But MATLAB seems to be annoying with this...
Example of the text file:
"picFile" "subjCode" "gender"
"train_1" 504 "m"
etc.
Can I get something like a matrix at all? I would then like to have MATLAB pull out some data by doing data(1,2) for example.
What would be the simplest way to do this?
It seems like having to write a loop using f-type functions is just a waste of time...
If you have a sufficiently new version of Matlab (R2013b+, I believe), you can use readtable, which is very much like how R does it:
T = readtable('data.txt','Delimiter',' ')
There are many functions for manipulating tables and converting back and forth between them and other data types such as cell arrays.
There are some other options in the data import and export section of the Statistics toolbox that should work in older versions of Matlab:
tblread: output in terms of separate variables for strings and numbers
caseread: output in terms of a char array
tdfread: output in terms of a struct
Alternatively, textscan should be able to accomplish what you need and probably will be the fastest:
fid = fopen('data.txt');
header = textscan(fid,'%s',3); % Optionally save header names
C = textscan(fid,'%s%d%s','HeaderLines',1); % Read data skipping header
fclose(fid); % Don't forget to close file
C{:}
Found a way to solve my problem.
Because I don't have the latest version of MATLAB and cannot use readable which would be the preferred option I ended up doing using textread and specifying the format of each column.
Tedious but maybe the "simplest" way I could find:
[picFile subCode gender]=textread('data.txt', '%s %f %s', 'headerlines',1);
T=[picFile(:) subCode(:) gender(:)]
The textscan solution by #horchler seems pretty similar. Thanks!

How do you save data to a text file in a given format?

I want to save a matrix to a text file, so I can read it by another program. Right now I use:
save('output.txt', 'A','-ascii');
But this saves my file as
6.7206983e+000 2.5896414e-001
6.5710723e+000 4.9800797e-00
6.3466334e+000 6.9721116e-001
5.9975062e+000 1.3346614e+000
6.0224439e+000 1.8127490e+000
6.3466334e+000 2.0517928e+000
6.3965087e+000 1.9721116e+000
But I would like to have them saved without the "e-notation" and not with all the digits. Is there an easy way to do this?
Edit: Thank you! That works just fine. Sorry, but I think I messed up your edit by using the rollback.
I would use the fprintf function, which will allow you to define for yourself what format to output the data in. For example:
fid = fopen('output.txt', 'wt');
fprintf(fid,'%0.6f %0.6f\n', A.');
fclose(fid);
This will output the matrix A with 6 digits of precision after the decimal point. Note that you also have to use the functions fopen and fclose.
Ditto gnovice's solution, if you need performance & custom formatting.
dlmwrite gives you some control (global, not per-field basis) of formatting. But it suffers from lower performance. I ran a test a few years ago and dlmwrite was something like 5-10x slower than the fopen/fprintf/fclose solution. (edit: I'm referring to large matrices, like a 15x10000 matrix)